[Foundation-l] A community the size of...

Thu Nov 10 15:49:50 UTC 2005

Based on results of the recent elections in the US, I thought I would 
try some comparisons with our own elections, to get a better idea of the 
effective size of the Wikimedia electorate. What I did was to take the 
elections results for cities in my general area, since I can find those 
very quickly. I chose those cities where the number of ballots cast in a 
contested local race (usually for city council) was closest to the 
number of ballots cast in two of our elections (the Board of Trustees 
election earlier this year, and the Arbitration Committee election last 
December on the English Wikipedia). I figured that the population of 
these cities would be a reasonable estimate of the effective size of our 
community. Naturally, this is an impressionistic rather than a rigorous 
statistical analysis.

At the time of the Arbitration Committee election, the number of ballots 
cast on the English Wikipedia was about the same as several cities with 
populations ranging roughly from 3,000-6,000 people. The upper end of 
this range is quite close to the number of people who edited five times 
or more last December, according to Erik Zachte's statistical reports. 
So it seems this may be the number that is closest to a real-world 
population for our community. Since those statistics have just been 
updated (thanks, Erik) we can see that the English Wikipedia is now 
nearly equivalent to a town of 15,000 people.

The turnout for the Board of Trustees election was comparable to a 
real-world population of about 7,000-11,000 people.
It's a little harder to find an equivalent number in our ongoing 
statistics, in part because project-wide participation is difficult to 
capture (<cough>single login</cough>). Even the number of users with 
five or more edits that month on just the Wikipedias collectively was 
significantly larger than this.

--Michael Snow